Tips an Shortcuts

Icon Machine's tools and commands provide a wide array of possibilities. These are just some of the things you can do for effective icon manipulation.

Copy Family & Paste Family commands

These commands are like copying and pasting icons in the Finder; they work on the entire icon family at once.If you copy an icon in the Finder, you can use the Paste Family command to paste all of the icon types at once. Conversely, you can use the Copy Family command and then go to the Finder and paste the icon onto an item.

If you want to get icons into a resource file, such as a Kaleidoscope scheme, you can use the Copy Family command and then paste all of the resources in using ResEdit or Resorcerer. This will give you all of the ICN#, icl8, etc. types, as well as the all-in-one icns resource. To go the other way, you can copy an icns resource and then use Icon Machine's Paste Family command.

In the future, Icon Machine will be able to save icons directly into resource files, as well as read them.

Working with Adobe Photoshop

Icon Machine will read the transparency information when you copy or drag from Adobe Photoshop images, so you can design your icons in Photoshop and then use Icon Machine to do the actual conversion into an icon.

Since selections also have transparency, you can easily assemble badged folder icons or whatever combination you want.

There seems to be a bug in Photoshop that causes it to crash if you copy or drag from a black and white icon in Icon Machine and try to place it in a Photoshop document. You can work around this problem by copying the black and white image to a color icon, and then bringing it into Photoshop.

Working with the Finder

When you save an icon, sometimes it takes the Finder a few seconds to display your changes.

The Finder uses the 1-bit mask (not the 8-bit bask) to determine the shape of the icon, for tasks like how much of the screen to redraw when an icon is selected, or figuring out if a mouse click is inside an icon. To make sure your 32-bit icon will work correctly, make sure that even the slightly opaque pixels are covered by opaque pixels in the 1-bit mask. If you see strange glitches in your 32-bit icon in the Finder, or you can't seem to click on it, you need to adjust the 1-bit mask.

Developing your own techniques

Experiment with dragging to and dropping from the different parts of the Icon Machine window. Once you have become familiar with how they all work together you will be able to work more quickly and perhaps achieve some effects that you couldn't otherwise do.

Sometimes creating a new document helps just to give you some temporary extra working space. You can use that space to construct an element and then drag it into your main icon window, taking advantage of the transparency mask so that the compositing comes out right.